Nadine Raaphorst

How to prove, how to interpret and what to do? Uncertainty experiences of street-level tax officials

ABSTRACT This study examines the kind of uncertainties frontline tax officials working with a trust-based inspection approach experience in interacting with citizen-clients. The classical literature on bureaucracy and the street-level bureaucracy literature suggest frontline officials face two kinds of uncertainties: information and interpretation problems. Analysing stories of Dutch frontline tax officials collected through in-depth interviews, this article shows that these two kinds of uncertainty only explain a part of the uncertainties experienced. Respondents also face action problems requiring improvisational judgements. The study furthermore finds that different sources underlie these uncertainties, pointing to possible explanations.

Organizational Socialization in Public Administration Research: A Systematic Review and Directions for Future Research:

Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach, we conducted a systematic review of 58 public administration studies of organizational socialization. Organizational socialization is the process of mutual adaptation between an organization and its new members. Our findings demonstrate a growing but geographically disparate interest in this issue. Public administration studies contribute to this research area with novel insights into the determinants of organizational socialization and its effects on employees’ public service motivation, Eurocrats’ support of supranational institutions, person–organization fit, and differences in the socialization of male and female public employees. The review also shows that the effects of organizational socialization on the homogenization of employees’ attitudes should not be exaggerated, especially relative to other homogenizing factors such as attraction or selection effects. The reviewed articles are methodologically eclectic, with a recent but growing interest in longitudinal designs. There are also weaknesses in the operationalization of organizational socialization. We conclude with an agenda for future studies on organizational socialization in public administration research.

'A necessary evil that does not "really" cure disease': The domestication of biomedicine by Dutch holistic general practitioners.

Against the background of studies about the domestication of complementary and alternative medicine into biomedical settings, this article studies how biomedicine is integrated into holistic settings. Data from 19 in-depth interviews with Dutch holistic general practitioners who combine complementary and alternative medicine with conventional treatments demonstrate that they do not believe that conventional biomedicine ‘really’ cures patients. They feel that it merely suppresses the physical symptoms of a disease, leaving the more fundamental and non-physical causes intact. As a consequence, they use conventional biomedicine for strictly practical and instrumental reasons. This is the case in life-threatening or acute situations, understood as non-physical causes of disease having been left untreated with complementary and alternative medicine for too long. More mundane reasons for its use are the need to take patients’ demands for biomedical treatment seriously or to obey authoritative rules, regulations and protocols. The integration of biomedicine into complementary and alternative medicine, then, follows the same logic of domestication of complementary and alternative medicine into biomedicine: it is made subordinate to the prevailing model of health and illness and treated as a practical add-on that does not ‘really’ cure people.

Double Standards in Frontline Decision Making: A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration

Drawing on status characteristics and double standards theory, this study explores how social categories may affect the standards tax officials use in evaluating citizen-clients’ trustworthiness, leading to differential evaluation. Whereas the street-level bureaucracy literature mainly focuses on the direct effect of social categories on officials’ judgments, this study shows how stereotyping in the public encounter could be much subtler and more pervasive than is hitherto studied. Based on semistructured interviews containing 40 stories of tax officials who inspect entrepreneurs’ tax returns, this study suggests that similar signals may indeed be interpreted differently for different social groups.

Unraveling the hindering factors of digital public service delivery at street-level: the case of electronic health records

Abstract There are several elements as to why digitization of public services is progressing slowly. Many explanations center on structural aspects of public institutions and their capacity and capabilities to implement digital tools. Others highlight the uptake by citizens as key to making technical solutions in the public domain work. This paper draws attention to a third line of argumentation by focusing on the role of street-level bureaucrats. Based on the assumption that they are caught in between the technical details of digital public service delivery and the organizational context in which these tools are implemented, the goal is to identify some of the factors that hinder the use of digital applications by street-level bureaucrats. To unravel those hindering factors, we use the “failed” implementation of electronic health records in the United Kingdom as an example in order to link it to existing research on digital governance and street-level bureaucracy. We conclude that the disconnect between organizational structures and digital tools is magnified at street-level, which may threaten discretionary power and autonomy of public servants and can make daily tasks more complicated and time-consuming. Policy implications drawn from this include, paying special attention to the trade-off between local autonomy regarding the adjustment of digital tools and national guidance and standardization as well as the distinction between the potential inability of public servants to use the tools due to limited training or age and the unwillingness linked to a loss of power and discretion.

From Poker Games to Kitchen Tables: How Social Dynamics Affect Frontline Decision Making:

Existing research on bureaucratic encounters typically studies how bureaucrats’ and clients’ characteristics influence frontline decision making. How social interactions between street-level bureaucrats and between officials and citizens could directly affect case-related decisions largely remains an underexplored field of study, despite the fact that new forms of governance introduce social dynamics in the form of trust and collaboration as tools to increase legitimacy. Relying on in-depth qualitative data of the Belgian labor inspectorate and the Dutch tax authorities, this study scrutinizes how decisions about cases could be affected by their immediate social context.